


Five Times Posner Almost Forgot Himself

by samskeyti



Category: History Boys (2006), History Boys - Bennett
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:21:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samskeyti/pseuds/samskeyti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After school, nothing much happens to Posner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Posner Almost Forgot Himself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whiteskydays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiteskydays/gifts).



He sees Dakin at Oxford and it’s a little like school, if not as predictable. Posner could never bear cutting him off entirely and it’s a decent theory that this gradual drift into a bigger orbit will make things easier. Things being Dakin himself, Posner’s wounded heart and the inevitable parade of people that Posner vaguely knows and who Dakin is going to fuck.

Then, there are new people to meet, or at least observe. People with the potential for fascination, or for sweeping crushes or lingering disaster. There’s one who swaggers so extravagantly that Posner makes a conscious note of closing his mouth when he watches him exit a room. One with dark hair and a manner so brittle and sharp-tongued that he seemed utterly perfect, as well as being Jewish. The tanned, possibly Italian one, who wore gold rings on three fingers.

He could, so easily, but Dakin will pop his head around a door, or loiter under an archway blinking and smiling into the sun, a cricket jumper slung over his shoulder even though he’s avoided playing since they were fourteen, Posner knows for a fact. Or he’ll cross the lawn, not drawing attention to himself, hunched and fisting his hands in his pockets, unshaven and up all night, somewhere — and when Posner flips through each of his new possibilities, holds them up for comparison, for _could he_ and _maybe_ and thinks he might be convinced, perhaps he might want to be seduced by one or other of them. Possibly. That is when he, without fail, will see Dakin again.

**

Back from University, he sees Irwin in a pub, standing alone up the far end of the bar with a small brown drink. He looks wry and too old to be pretty, though evidently he once was. He almost darts across to greet him with a hand on his arm, adult and suave now, with a hand on Irwin’s arm, with a knowing what he’s doing even if he’ll never know what it is he wants. Almost, but no.

Posner peers through the smoke and the dim, at the way Irwin fidgets, adjusting his glass on its drink mat. The look he gives the room, all squints and eyelashes and hands. Dithering and fluttering, all the trying to be beguiling that Posner recognises in a drenching flash, flushing to the tips of his ears and blotching up around his eyes. His own sweetly self-deprecating moves, and he — oh God — he wouldn’t talk to himself, either.

**

A boy. Or not so much a _boy_ , he’s a Sixth Former, eighteen for months and self-aware. Ice-blond, a rower, an easy laugh, a trail of willing girls — that kind of self-aware and Posner is the student teacher, unable to keep a grip on the blackboard duster, or his words or the way his heart (doomed and Romantic, ugh) is lapping this up when he knows that this is poison.

His preceptor, used to nerves, terror, even once, yes, fainting amongst his charges, assures him it is _all_ going to be _fine._ Posner makes his mouth go apologetic and sceptical, a shape that does for words and makes the teacher laugh and clap him on the shoulder.

He’s a little too sharp, when he isn’t blankly ignoring the boy. Sharp, but never quite unkind. He could draw from memory the way his hair falls in a circle from the crown of his head, heaviest in front, the way his eyes look almost closed when he reads, the way he thrusts his legs out under the desk, rough and thoughtless, intruding into the aisle in front, but then he lifts one ankle and crosses it over the other and the mannerism is almost dainty. He thinks he’s counted the scrapes on the soles of his shoes.

He’s careful to be firm, bland, especially distant, even though he remembers — exactly and vividly and pitiably — how this always looks.

**

He meets a boy in a club in London and he worries. He thinks (as they kiss in the glitter-ball and dry ice fog, a man’s tongue tracing his, the roughness of his chin, the hand slinking down his arse, inside his jeans) — he’s wondered if he’s wrong about this, and (kissing him too, fingers up under the stretch of his shirt, breath hitching under his touch in a way he’d never imagined) perhaps after all, he isn’t.

Later, he takes his shirt off and trousers off and they touch each other, greedy and noisy and it feels like playing a part, it’s all so ridiculous. It’s ridiculous and he wonders, standing critically back and outside himself until his neck is bitten, quick and unexpected and he feels it down his spine, pushing at his hips and shivering his toes and he stops frowning and wondering, as suddenly as if he’s dropped from the ceiling.

They’ve taken off all their clothes and Posner is pushed back, toppled onto the bed and he gasps and laughs at the look on the man’s face, at the still being wanted, at the man’s cock, still hard, at least in part for _him_. He spreads his thighs and tips back his head, all neck and pale skin and _yes_ and when it comes — the weight and press and the way they both want to move fast and slow at once, they way they don’t have words for this, but insist on saying them, anyway —

He thinks — not _then_ , but before and almost and after — he wasn’t wrong, not at all.

**

It's at the funeral. After, at the wake when he retreats from the hall full of boots and dress uniforms and finds him, in the corridor between the restrooms and the storage area with its ladders of chairs. He’s kicking more scuffs into the cream and green walls, his hair grown longer at the back, waves sticking out like fins. He’s broader in the arms and somehow narrower in the waist, or perhaps he simply has a suit that fits.

His face is still Scripps, though whiter. Posner looks, fascinated and touches, knowing he shouldn’t, he daren’t or he had not dared. He touches his cheeks, holds his face in the flats of his palms and Scripps watches him, a look in his eyes that’s almost tender and almost scared and he lets him and for that Posner wants to love him, always.

Posner’s aware he’s making a parody of the sorts of priestly hands he’d imagined jealously, of absolution, and neither of them get that. Maybe not even Lockwood gets that. He kisses him, simply, his lips on the corner of his mouth, half covering, half away and as slow as he can bear it. And Scripps, heartbreaking bastard, draws him into an embrace.

It’s been a day for weeping and now, despite Scripps' fingers lacing through his hair, his breath wordless and uneven at his ear, his chest wide and still and making an echo of Posner’s give-away racing heart, his heart that’s like a a cat out of its bag, a rapid-blipping alarm that Scripps can’t fail to notice, yet he’s unflinching and still there, after all that Posner’s messed up. Now, he doesn’t cry, not even a bit.


End file.
